Group wagers Gardiner's Beethoven is the best

Nov. 16, 2012

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Conductor John Eliot Gardiner will lead his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Monteverdi Choir and soloists in performances of Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" and Ninth Symphony on Monday and Tuesday in Segerstrom Concert Hall. ORR

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Conductor John Eliot Gardiner will lead his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Monteverdi Choir and soloists in performances of Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" and Ninth Symphony on Monday and Tuesday in Segerstrom Concert Hall. ORR

Conductor John Eliot Gardiner will lead his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Monteverdi Choir and soloists in performances of Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" and Ninth Symphony on Monday and Tuesday in Segerstrom Concert Hall. ORR

The Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the area's oldest presenter of classical music, is taking the unusual step of offering a money-back guarantee to its concert on Tuesday. John Eliot Gardiner will conduct his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Monteverdi Choir and soloists in a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Segerstrom Concert Hall. If ticket holders don't feel it's the best Beethoven's Ninth they've ever heard, the Society will refund the price of the ticket.

That's news to Gardiner, on the phone from the first stop of his U.S. tour with his musicians in North Carolina.

Yes it is, but Gardiner (and the Society) should be OK. The conductor and his period-instrument orchestra's interpretations of the Beethoven symphonies are both groundbreaking and justifiably celebrated, and it seems unlikely that any listener would be unhappy enough after Tuesday's concert to ask for his or her money back.

Gardiner and the orchestra are returning here for the first time since 1999, when they performed all nine of Beethoven's symphonies in a series of concerts. They'll offer two programs this time, a rare performance of Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" on Monday, the Ninth, preceded by Beethoven's cantata "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," on Tuesday.

Gardiner's Beethoven interpretations are what are known as "historically informed" (he prefers the term to "authentic"). His orchestra performs on period instruments (gut strings, old-style bows, brass without valves) of the type used in Beethoven's time; his choir includes just 35 singers. He honors Beethoven's own controversial metronome markings, usually much faster than traditional (modern) performances take. Hefty doses of scholarship affect everything from the shapes of phrases to the articulations of single notes.

The English conductor, 69, is ready and willing to discuss the intricacies of his approach, which involve just as much feeling as learning. For the Trio section of the Ninth's Scherzo, for instance, some feel that Beethoven's nephew, Karl, wrote down the wrong metronome marking as the deaf composer, playing the symphony on the piano, set the tempo. The result is that most performers traditionally take the Trio at roughly half the speed of the metronome marking in the score. Not Gardiner.

"I don't think he (Karl) did get it wrong," Gardiner says. "I think it is correct." But he's far from doctrinaire about it. "It is a controversial area for tempo and it works either way," he adds.

"In the end it comes down to what's comfortable for the horn player, because the horn has the main melody in the second half of the Trio. On the natural (valveless) horn there is a natural tempo and you have to find out with your player what that tempo is, and not be hidebound or theory-bound in your approach to the music. It needs to be pragmatic and practical."

The three ensembles Gardiner founded – the English Baroque Soloists, in addition to the ORR and Monteverdi Choir – operate in an unusual fashion. The London-based groups, made up of freelance musicians, do not offer subscription seasons or have residence in a regular concert hall. Rather, the groups are project- and tour-oriented, coming together for specific programs envisioned by Gardiner, and recording for their own label.

With many American orchestras in financial straits, Gardiner's model might seem to be a better, more flexible one, but he says otherwise. The recession has hit him hard.

"It's an epidemic and it's a delayed epidemic because when the recession started two years ago, the music profession didn't seem to be too badly affected in terms of the concert diary and the schedule," he says. "Now it's really, really hitting in 2012/13. And we've had a number of really exciting large-scale projects canceled in the last month or two and its very, very sad and very worrying."

Earlier this year, funds for a project came from a surprising quarter. English comedian Alexander Armstrong, whom Gardiner had never met, launched a fundraising campaign so that Gardiner could complete his massive recording project of Bach's sacred cantatas (there are some 200). Four of them remained to be recorded; Armstrong asked 2,500 music lovers to donate 20 pounds each (about $31) to get the recording done.

"People responded very much to this delightful fellow, Mr. Armstrong, who made an appeal on our behalf," Gardiner says. "We raised quite a lot of money and we were able to do the recording."

Monday night's performance of the "Missa Solemnis" is offered without the money-back guarantee. Hearing it at all is a rare enough opportunity, no tease necessary.

"It's hugely challenging for the performers," Gardiner says. "And Beethoven put so much of himself into the composition of it."

The composer, at that point almost completely deaf, wrote it in the early 1820s, when he "isolated himself and tussled and struggled with the material in this music for several years, in solitary confinement," Gardiner says.

"The result is a majestic and wonderful piece, but hugely demanding of everybody involved, because it's technically incredibly challenging for the solo singers, the chorus even more so and the orchestra, in terms of the tessitura, in terms of the stamina required and the virtuosity. But it's also an incredibly moving work, because it represents, to me anyway, Beethoven's struggles of belief and his justification on Earth as an artist. It's all written into that music."

Along with the Ninth Symphony and the last string quartets, the "Missa Solemnis" represents Beethoven's crowning achievement as a composer, the final period in his life featured in the Philharmonic Society's multi-season "Beethoven: The Late Great" series. Gardiner is particularly inspired by this period.

"Oh, the courage of the man," he says. "The courage to explore areas that no other composer had hitherto explored. And above all, I suppose, the ultimate confidence to be able to crystallize the ideas that had been churning around inside him, which he couldn't hear in a formal way – he couldn't actually hear the results in a practical sense – but the ability to crystallize that music in a way that the rest of us can savor and enjoy and rejoice in really. Because his vision is just immeasurable, and his sense of humanity is incredibly touching."

Listeners don't often, if ever, get to hear these masterpieces on successive nights, let alone in historically informed performances. We tell Gardiner that we're looking forward to it.

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